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Tuesday, March 09, 2010

The $5 In(Sink)erator / Garbage Disposal

This summer’s experiment in compost promises to be a thrilling one: GRINDING the compost up before dumping it out back!

I did try this once last summer in the big food processor, with some success (but a bit of a mess as well). I found this mini unit at Value Village on Sunday (ominously marked “as is”) for $4.99, and decided that once again I’d give it a whirl… GET IT??? Whirl? Like the spinning scary sharp steel blade of a food processor?

Okay!

So I just tried it now with a small sample load – a couple of onion peels and kiwi / veg scraps, and it did a decent job. Not fully puréed, more like really teeny chunks but then, the stuff wasn’t cooked at all and I wasn’t expecting much anyway.

When I added a bit of water, it made quite a respectable slurry, which I then went outside and poured directly on the compost pile.

Benefits of “pre-digesting” compost include:

Faster time to break down in the pile

Takes up less space in the kitchen

Takes up less space in the pile

Less attraction to mammalian and other large-scale vermin because it decomposes so fast

Hmm… there must be at least one more!

Theoretically, and this, I suppose, would be for people far more crunchy than myself, we could have been fine-grinding our kitchen compost all winter and freezing the resultant sludge in the basement deep-freezer, with the expectation of thawing & transferring it to the backyard composters come spring. Yup; people do that… but I guess not me.

I guess it’s pretty far gone just to be talking about grinding up my garbage. But I figure if people can grind their waste in their kitchen sink and then send it into the sewage-treatment system, I can go one better and try grinding up ours for our own backyard “compost-treatment system.”